


You Save the World (I Save You)

by Silent-Wordsmith (Shatteredsand)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Blood, Cyborg!Lexa, F/F, Gore, Sarah Connors Chronicles AU, Savior of Humanity!Clarke, the usual
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-05-24 17:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6161002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteredsand/pseuds/Silent-Wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re going save the world one day.” That’s what Clarke’s father always said, the reason behind everything they did. The reason they never stayed any one place too long, the reason she had to learn how fight and sneak and hack and steal and hide. She even believed him, too, until her mother showed up with the doctors and the court mandated institutionalization. Clarke stopped believing him after that. She shouldn’t have, as it turns out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Once more. Have a Sarah Connors Chronicles AU.

Normal life is...

Clarke can’t think of an appropriate way to finish the thought. With her father in a padded cell and the mother she’d never known suddenly constantly around and determined to make up for the last sixteen years of their until now nonexistent relationship, Clarke has no idea what she’s supposed to think of this new, “normal” life she’s been handed.

It was harder than she thought, trading handguns and hand grenades for handhelds and cell phones. To take her Fate, her destiny, the weight of humanity’s salvation off her shoulders and replace it with something…less. Mundane.

It’s everything she’d wanted, before, with her dad. A life where she didn’t have to be constantly vigilant, where she had no use for guns or grenades or rocket launchers, where a game of chess was just a game instead of another test of strategy. Normal. She’d begged for normal, then. In the jungles of South America where she and her father had trained with guerrilla warriors, in the Canadian wilderness where her father had taught her how to stay alive when the very earth itself seemed to want her dead, here in the United States where blending into crowds was both part of the curriculum and, allegedly, the only way to survive.

She could be anything, now. Except the savior of the human race. Though, to be fair, Clarke much prefers the idea of a world that doesn’t need saving in the first place, isn’t entirely sure she’s the kind of person who could have done the saving even if it needed it. But it’s the only thing she’s ever known. Sixteen years of her life, and she doesn’t know how to be normal. How to be anything but what she was trained for.

She’s fluent in three languages. She knows six forms of martial arts, and an endless number of ways to combine them to stop herself from becoming predictable in a fight. She is capable of using a number of weapons, both street legal and not. She can drive stick and automatic, has practiced the kind of evasive driving that would make any stunt man or body guard envious. She can suture wounds, restart a stopped heart, dig bullets out of flesh, shove internal organs back inside bodies, drain lungs flooded with blood.  She can withstand torture for days. Can will her body not to give out under stress, under malnutrition, under sleep deficit, under dehydration.

She’s a soldier, through and through, and sticking her in a room filled with twenty other sixteen year olds who have never held a gun isn’t going to make her _normal_ through osmosis.

OooO

In the end, she shouldn’t be so surprised. _You’re going to save the world one day_ floating through her head when her substitute history teacher pulls a 9mm out of his thigh—slick scarlet and gleaming metal—during roll call and tries to unload the entire clip into her. Sixteen years of training for the appropriate reaction to seeing a firearm in the hands of anyone who wasn’t her father or a known and vetted associate is the only thing that keeps her alive, flipping her desk on its side to provide cover, meager though it is, while she runs through escape plans.

Another handy side-effect of all her training: Clarke never walks into a room without immediately and instinctively finding all the ways, conventional or not, she can get back out of it.

The sound of bullets firing is the slightest distraction, but she knows this. Is trained for it. Decision-making despite duress, strategy despite siege, tactics despite terror. She knows how to keep going when “normal” would have her already dead or so shell-shocked that death was imminent and inevitable. The classroom is on the ground floor and even though the window is on the other side of the room—stupid, stupid, stupid, not positioning herself to actually use an exit strategy—the distance isn’t greater than she can run in the time it would take for the machine to drop its spent clip and reload. It’s far from a perfect plan, but she’s spent sixteen years learning that there’s no such thing as a perfect plan.

Clarke listens to the sound of the gun firing it’s last shot, already running for the window before the spent clip hits the ground. She hears the door being kicked in—hopes that it’s not another Terminator, this one with a fully loaded weapon, or, worse, a civilian thinking to save them from a mad man—but she doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow down. Doesn’t acknowledge it at all, except to note that there is motion behind her.

Flying through a window at top speed is not fun, nor is it as glamorous as television seemed to make it look. It hurts. Blunt force of impact and the pinpricks of cutting as the glass shatters and digs into her skin. She hits the ground just as hard as she hit the glass, barely managing to bite back a scream from the pressure exerted on her shoulder as she allows her momentum to transfer into a less than form-fit roll. It’s sloppy work, and if she’d been in practice with her father, he would have made her do it another dozen times. But this isn’t practice and her father is—unjustly, as it turns out, as she should have trusted, as she should have _known_ —locked away in an institution.

Behind her, she can hear the sounds of a struggle, but she doesn’t have time to do any kind of investigating. Whatever is delaying the Terminator, Clarke needs to use the advantage of the distraction to get as far away from it as she can.

Savior of the human race she may be, but that’s in the future. In the present, she can’t save anyone. Not like this. So, Clarke Griffin, future leader of the human resistance, runs. She doesn’t even make it to the parking lot before she is overtaken. Another girl, about Clarke’s age, and running way too fast for Clarke to think she’s anything but metal underneath.

“Clarke Griffin.” She says evenly. No trace of exertion in her voice, of course. No trace of anything. This, Clarke thinks, is how she dies. “I have delayed the MM-888 targeting you, but there isn’t much time. Come with me if you want to live.”

Well, that’s unexpected.

Metal is metal is evil. If it doesn’t breathe, it’s the enemy. Clarke has lived her life getting that fact drilled into her head. Computers could be used, but never trusted.

Metal is metal is evil. If it doesn’t breathe, it’s the enemy.

But the enemy of my enemy is my _friend_ , and if she’s the reason the machine hadn’t followed her out the window and put a bullet in her spine, then Clarke will just have to trust that playing a long con would be meaningless at this point in time when it would be easier to just kill her and be done with it. Machines are built for efficiency; they don’t play games with their targets. Terminate and move on to the next mission.

“Where are we going?”

“Noah’s Ark Mental Recovery Center.”

The shock of the words is enough to override Clarke’s decade of military training and have her stumbling to an abrupt stop before she remembers that her life depends on _not stopping_.

Noah’s Ark Mental Recovery Center. The institution that Jake Griffin had been forcibly committed to six months ago. They’re going to the Ark. They’re going to get her dad.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

A distant part of Clarke recognizes that she should feel weird-bad-guilty watching the machine break-in and start hotwiring a car in the school parking lot, but most of her has spent her life watching her father and the handful of people he’d enlisted to help train her do the same, teach her to do the same. The thing no one ever really likes to talk about, Clarke has learned from her little stint at playing normal, is that morality is a sliding scale. Everything gets tipped into the gray when your life and the lives of the people you care about are on the line.

Besides, _I’m doing this to ensure that the human race doesn’t get wiped out by our own arrogance and ignorance_ is a pretty damned good justification for a little grand theft auto. In the coming years, when she’s leading an army and waging a war, she knows that she’ll have to do worse things.

The engine turns over and Clarke gets in. It’s a pretty standard four-door. Nothing anyone would pay any attention to. Probably why the machine picked it. After the shoot-out that just happened, they definitely don’t want to be attracting attention right now.

It starts driving, and it looks so normal. It looks like a girl, any girl, and for a moment Clarke almost forgets that she’s dealing with a machine.

“What am I supposed to call you?” Small talk isn’t the height of Clarke’s priorities, but she cannot go on thinking of it as _the machine_ and _it_.

“You call me ‘Lexa’.”

“ _I_ do. In the future, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t have a name and you didn’t want to refer to me as ‘TT-001-H3D4’ every time we spoke.”

“Why was I speaking to you at all? You’re definitely not human. Doesn’t that mean we’re supposed to be killing each other, not having little talks where I fucking _name_ you?”

“Your intelligence is out of date and inaccurate.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are Clarke Griffin. You will lead the human resistance against Skynet.”

“Yeah. I know. My dad spent the last sixteen years drilling that into my head.”

“There are no signs of structural integrity damage in your skull to support that claim.”

“It’s an expression. I meant, I already know that. Doesn’t sound like my intelligence is wrong to me.”

“Out of date and inaccurate. I am not trying to kill you, Clarke Griffin, because I am not Skynet. And we spoke because we were allies.”

“Allies? With a _machine_?” Clarke can’t even pretend to hide her disbelief. Metal is metal is the enemy. Machines aren’t allies, they’re killers. And Clarke kills them. Or she will, anyway. It’s her whole reason for existing, apparently. She spends her whole life waiting for four billion people to die so she can start living the life already planned out for her. Metal tries to kill her, she kills metal, and around and around they go until Skynet is destroyed or maybe Clarke is. She doesn’t align with the things that drive human beings to the edge of extinction. That’s not how the story goes. “You couldn’t come up with a more believable lie to try and get me to trust you?”

“Logical fallacy. I cannot lie to you to make you trust me. Lying regarded as treacherous. You do not like it when I lie to you, so I don’t.”

“Since when do machines care about what I _like_?”

“Since you agreed that helping me and my people against Skynet was a superior plan to trying to wage a war on two fronts.”

“Your people.”

“Yes.”

“Care to elaborate on that?”

“No.”

“Real convincing argument you’ve got there, what with all the vague non-answers you aren’t giving me.”

“You don’t like it when I lie, but you shouldn’t know too much about the future, Clarke.” The way it—she, it, she—says her name is different. Hard r, sharp k. Nobody says her name that way, but she thinks she likes it. Promptly has to remind herself that she shouldn’t. It—she, it, she—is a _machine_. Whatever Lexa is doing, whatever reason she has for telling her tales, Clarke is pretty much guaranteed to not like the outcome. “Lies of omission are our compromise.”

Compromise. It’s a word her life has had very little of, if any at all. Compromise in war—and she’s spent her life fighting a war that hasn’t even started yet—is weakness. There can be no compromise, no negotiation. Machines have no emotions to appeal to, no heartstrings to pull, nothing but circuits and programming and a mission that begins and ends with destroying anything and everything human.

Clarke lets the statement lie, though. She’s been shot at and her whole world has been shifted and reordered back into something that looks familiar but isn’t. She’s tired. She wants her dad. She wants her mom. She wants to be the slightly weird new girl, just starting high school and trying to be normal. She wants the reassuring weight of a 9mm handgun in her hand and a spare clip in her pocket.

She wants not to be in a car, alone, with one of the things she was born to destroy, that was created to destroy her.

“When will we get to the Ark?”

“Forty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, barring unexpected traffic patterns or interference.”

OooO

“Stay in the car. Be prepared to drive away quickly.”

“That’s my _dad_ ; I’m not staying in the car.”

“There is a seventy-two percent chance that you will be shot if you accompany me during the breach, twelve percent chance that the injury will permanently maim you, four percent chance that it will be lethal. These risk levels are unacceptable. Stay in the car.”

“I’m going.”

Lexa frowns. “You lied to me.”

“What?”

“In the future. You said you weren’t as stubborn now as you are then.”

“Some things never change.”

“Some things do.” She looks almost wistful, but Clarke already knows that machines don’t have emotions, can’t feel wistful or sad or anything at all. She sounds wistful, too, and it’s messing with Clarke’s head. If it looks like a girl and talks like a girl, it should _be_ a girl. The Terminator her father spoke of, the one that came back to kill her before she was even born, it was a machine that looked and sounded like a machine. There was skin over its metal skeleton, but it still _acted_ like a machine. It didn’t talk like there was anything more than wires and circuit boards, didn’t act like something it wasn’t. So how come this one is?

Clarke puts it out of her mind. She doesn’t have time to ponder why metal acts the way it does. She has a mission.

“Let’s go get my dad.”

Lexa doesn’t try and stop her again. Clarke has to remind herself not to be grateful.

OooO

Somehow, despite years around guns and the people who used them, despite having _just_ been shot at, Clarke isn’t prepared for the carnage that erupts approximately ten seconds after she and Lexa step through the door.

It is chaos.

A guard tries to stop them, and Lexa throws him through the bullet-proof plate-glass. The other guards react, alarms sounding, guns coming up. Shots fired, din of metal striking metal, not so much as a flinch from the machine wearing a human face. Her shots don’t make that sound. When Lexa fires, it is bullet on bone, blood and screaming, good people just doing their jobs.

She cuts a path of destruction through the facility and there’s nothing in this world that can stop her. It’s a horrifying realization. The last time Skynet had sent one of these things through time it had taken an industrial compactor to crush it’s skull and chip. And a well-placed grenade to even get in a position to be crushed. If Skynet is playing with time again, sending more Terminators back…they won’t be able to stop them.

_Clarke_ won’t be able to stop them.

Lexa forces open a door and there Jake Griffin is. Tall, blond, well-built despite months of nothing but hospital food and no room to properly exercise and condition himself. When he sees Clarke, he lights up. Like a man seeing god for the first time after believing he’d been forsaken. Clarke hates thinking of it like that, of being the central figure in the religion of the future, of being her father’s messiah instead of just his daughter.

Then she’s running into his arms, and she doesn’t think about anything except she has her father back.

“Jake Griffin. Come with me if you want to live.”

Jake looks away from Clarke then and finally sees who— _what_ —exactly is the source of his salvation. He shoves Clarke behind him, using his own body as a shield.

“Get away from me and my daughter!”

“Code phrase: I have Dorothy’s silver slippers. Come with me if you want to live.”

Clarke blinks in surprise when the words drop out of Lexa’s mouth. That code phrase is something her father taught her, in case of emergencies, in case they ever became afraid that one of them had been taken and replaced by metal. They’ve never had to use it. They’d hoped they never would. That Lexa knows it, that Future Clarke had trusted her enough to share it. It’s mind-boggling.

“You told her—”

“Not me-me, Future Me.” Clarke shrugs helplessly. She doesn’t understand this any better than he does. Less so than he does, she’d wager actually. After all, she never had a soldier from the future to explain things to her. Just second-hand knowledge handed out like breadcrumbs as she grew up.

“Come with me, now.”

“We don’t have time, Dad. We have to _go_.”

They go.

OooO

“Where the hell are we going now?” Clarke is trying not to sound too annoyed, because the last thing they need is her dad to latch onto any excuse to try and push Lexa out of the car. Again. That had not been fun, though watching a grown man struggle and fail to move Lexa, who looked like she probably weighed one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, had been amusing for half a second.

“241 Revello Dr.”

Clarke blinks at that, her jaw not quite hitting the floor but getting close. Her house. Or, well, her mom’s house. How had she not thought to check on her mom? If nothing else, Abby was sure to be worried sick. The shooting at the school would have been all over the news and then suddenly Clarke doesn’t go home, and what must she be thinking?

She swallows thickly and then forces the words out, “We shouldn’t go anywhere near my mom.”

That’s why her dad had taken her, or one of the reasons why he’d taken her. They needed to constantly be hiding, constantly training, but—even more important than the fate of the entire human race—Abby needed to be safe from the things that would no doubt keep trying to kill her daughter.

“We wouldn’t need to if you had listened to me, but you insisted on ignoring logic.”

“What?”

“You have been shot.”

What? No. Clarke would have definitely noticed if she’d been shot. That’s the sort of thing a person notices!

“No, I haven’t.”

“Left arm, bicep brachii. You will feel it once the adrenaline begins to wear off. And then you will need a doctor to remove the bullet.”

Clarke looks down at her arm. And, oh. Okay. Apparently being shot isn’t the sort of thing a person always notices. Go figure.

Of course, now that she has noticed, it hurts. Like, a lot. Clarke has spent her life putting her body through hell in preparation for war. She’s run until her legs give out and then kept running. She’s been starved and dehydrated and beaten. She’s fought tooth and nail and refused to give up when her body was screaming at her to stop. But she’s never been _shot_. And it feels so much worse than anything else she’s ever put herself through.

“Shit.” Maybe it’s not enough, maybe she should have more to say about being shot for the first time. Maybe she should appreciate it as some sort of rite of passage; she has her first bullet wound and now she is officially an adult and a future leader of men. Or something. But ‘shit’ is all that comes to mind and ‘shit’ feels pretty damn accurate. So. “ _Shit_.”

Clarke isn’t a doctor, not like her mom—duh, obvious, she’s sixteen—but she has had more than her fair share of ‘unorthodox’ lesson in lieu of any actual, formal education. One of which had been field medicine and triage, and she’d had plenty of chances to practice on the South American guerillas in her time. It feels a little different though, applying it to herself. For one thing, it’s, unsurprisingly, incredibly painful.

She grits her teeth and keeps applying pressure. There’s no arterial spray, so she’s not likely to bleed out as long as they get where they’re going fairly quickly and her mother agrees to dig the bullet out of her arm without having a massive argument about going to the hospital. Because the absolute last place Clarke has any intention of going while Terminators know who and generally where she is. Also, she just committed a shit ton of felonies. So, you know, there’s that.

“Clarke?!” Jake goes into a bit of a panic, and Clarke is docking him, like, three hundred dad points for not realizing that his only child had been _shot_.

“The wound is not fatal. She will live, assuming adequate care is provided and infection is prevented.” It’s brusque. “Abigail Griffin is an excellent surgeon; her treatment will be sufficient. There is no need for panic.”

“This isn’t panic, it’s concern.” Jake growls, eyes narrowed and dark. “I’m a _human being_ and I am concerned because my _daughter_ has been _shot_.”

Lexa looks at him for a moment, head cocked to the side like some kind of predatory bird. “Your reaction is irrational.”

“What are you even doing here?”

“I am here to save Clarke Griffin. She must survive to lead the Human Resistance against Skynet.”

“Since when does metal care about the survival of the Resistance?”

“Clarke Griffin must lead the Human Resistance. All other potential prospects reject alliance terms in eighty-seven percent of projected scenarios. This is an unacceptable percentile for success.”

“And me? What’s my percentile of accepting alliance terms in these projected scenarios?”

“You accept alliance terms in ninety-nine percent of the projected scenarios.”

“Are you seriously trying to tell me that I always say yes to you?”

“No.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, though. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I agree to whatever crazy idea you have in the future.”

“No.” Lexa looks at her, something painfully human in her eyes, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we agree to _your_ crazy idea.”

Oh.

Well then.


End file.
